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The name Fat Man refers to the early design of the bomb because it had a wide, round shape. Fat Man was an implosion-type nuclear weapon with a solid plutonium core. The first of that type to be detonated was the Gadget in the Trinity nuclear test less than a month earlier on 16 July at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico.
Bockscar, sometimes called Bock's Car, is the United States Army Air Forces B-29 bomber that dropped a Fat Man nuclear weapon over the Japanese city of Nagasaki during World War II in the second – and most recent – nuclear attack in history.
The Mark 4 nuclear bomb was an American implosion-type nuclear bomb based on the earlier Mark 3 Fat Man design, used in the Trinity test and the bombing of Nagasaki.With the Mark 3 needing each individual component to be hand-assembled by only highly trained technicians under closely controlled conditions, the purpose of the Mark 4 was to produce an atomic weapon as a practical piece of ordnance.
The 1945 photo shows Manhattan Project physicist Harold Agnew holding the heart of one of the most devastating weapons in the world.
Early weapons were very large and could only be used as free fall bombs. These were known by "Mark" designators, like the Mark 4 which was a development of the Fat Man weapon. As weapons became more sophisticated they also became much smaller and lighter, allowing them to be used in many roles.
The Fat Man device specifically used 6.2 kg (14 lb), about 350 ml or 12 US fl oz in volume, of Pu-239, which is only 41% of bare-sphere critical mass (see Fat Man article for a detailed drawing). Surrounded by a U-238 reflector/tamper, the Fat Man's pit was brought close to critical mass by the neutron-reflecting properties of the U-238. During ...
Fat Man was a strategic nuclear weapon dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki during the final stages of World War II. It was the second and last (as of February 01, 2025) nuclear weapon to be used in combat. The nuclear strike killed an estimated 35,000–40,000 people outright, including 23,200–28,200 Japanese civilian factory workers ...
The first Fat Man pre-assembly, known as F13, was assembled by 31 July, and expended in a drop test the next day. This was followed by F18 on 4 August, which was dropped the next day. [236] Three sets of Fat Man pre-assemblies, designated F31, F32, and F33, arrived on B-29s of the 509th Composite Group and 216th Army Air Forces Base Unit on 2 ...